The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Brit star has penned a dandy short novel with a wicked ending

The discovery of a youthful suicide's diary turns a retired man's cozy life upside down in The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

By:James Grainger Published on Sat Aug 06 2011

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed,” muses Tony Webster at the beginning of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. A slew of equally banal observations about time and memory follow as Tony looks back at an achingly unremarkable life, keeping to a safe emotional and philosophical middle ground every step of the way.

In a series of sharply etched recollections the reader follows Tony, a retired arts administrator, through his adolescence in early 1960s suburban London, where he pals around with two other bright but not brilliant school chums. The easy camaraderie acquires a competitive edge when fellow student Adrian Finn, whose precocious intellect impresses even the jaded school masters, joins the group. Except for the suicide of a classmate, their school years are without major incident.

Adrian is both wise beyond his years and otherworldly, a beguiling combination for the boys’ romantic imaginations. Their competition for his approval continues even after the boys head off to different universities — Adrian to Cambridge, the rest to lesser schools.

Tony ends up at Bristol, where he embarks on his only foray into the unpredictable: a sexually charged relationship with an elusive beauty named Veronica Ford, who eventually tires of his mundane ways and takes up with Adrian. When Adrian commits suicide not long after, Tony considers that part of his life closed forever and goes on to marry, have a child and peacefully divorce.

Having carefully freighted these otherwise banal recollections with two suicides, Barnes then drags his narrative skeletons from the closet with the arrival of a solicitor’s letter in Tony’s mailbox. The letter informs Tony that Veronica’s recently deceased mother, who he met briefly on just one occasion, has left him 500 pounds and Adrian’s final diary.

If this mysterious news isn’t unsettling enough, it seems that Veronica, who Tony hasn’t seen in 40 years, has stolen the diary and has no intention of sharing its contents. Tony may be dull, but he is also dogged. He is soon off on an uncharacteristic personal crusade to retrieve the diary and uncover the reasons for Adrian’s suicide, even if it means putting himself back under Veronica’s maddening influence.

One of the novel’s persistent joys is how much mystery, nuance and pathos Barnes draws from his narrator’s pedantic but self-serving memories, without showing the reader his narrative hand. Barnes artfully teases the reader from the first page, following each revelation and dramatic incident with another round of Tony’s increasingly existential life reflections.

Tony is not altogether a boor. He makes some curt observations about class, sex, repression and the intellectual pretensions of bright young Englishmen of his time.

“Yes, of course we were pretentious,” Tony admits. “What else is youth for?”

He is especially good about the ’60s. The decade’s sexual and psychedelic liberties, the reader is told, were “only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.” Tony’s demographic was effectively still living in the 1950s, so much so that looking back on the rituals of his prolonged and almost sexless courtship of Veronica makes him feel like “a survivor from some antique, bypassed culture whose members were still using carved turnips as a form of monetary exchange.”

Cutting sociological observations aside, Tony remains blind to the duplicity of his own motives, both in his current and youthful dealings with Veronica. Even as clues about his complicity in Adrian’s suicide pile up, Tony blithely ignores them in favour of less upsetting conclusions.

Readers are apt to agree with Veronica when she tells Tony, “You just don’t get it . . . You never did, and you never will.” Readers will also, like Tony, be no less surprised by the revelations revealed in the book’s closing pages.

Having skillfully lulled us into complacency with a parade of memory’s banalities, Barnes pulls off his shocking ending with such confidence most readers will want to read the story again to see how he did it — and to draw even more enjoyment from this startling little novel, which has deservedly made the long list for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

James Grainger is the author of the story collection The Long Slide (ECW Press).

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